


Remus Lupin and the Book of Unnameable Power

by femmecassidy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Bisexual Mary Macdonald, Bisexual Remus Lupin, F/F, F/M, Gay Sirius Black, Lesbian Marlene McKinnon, Look everyone's gay I don't make the rules, M/M, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Peter Pettigrew actually exists
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-17
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2019-10-29 23:00:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 18,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17817173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/femmecassidy/pseuds/femmecassidy
Summary: All Remus Lupin wants is to keep his nose down and have an uneventful fourth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. But with monthly werewolf transformations, three mischievous best friends, raging teenage hormones, and a Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher with an ominous ulterior motive to contend with, will Remus make it out alive?A Remus-centric Marauders' Era story, with slow burn Wolfstar and some Jily foreshadowing to boot.





	1. All Aboard

“You have your cauldron?”

“Yes, Mam.”

“What about those scales of yours?”

“ _Yes_ , Mam.”

“And your wand? You mustn’t forget your wand, Remus, dear —“

Remus pulled his wand out of his pocket and held it up for his mam to see, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. Hope Lupin’s eyes softened as she smiled.

“I’m being ridiculous again, aren’t I?”

“Only a little bit,” Lyall Lupin said, kissing his wife on the top of her head.

“I’m going to be fine, Mam,” Remus insisted. “I promise.”

He glanced at the clock hanging above the station. It was practically a Lupin tradition to be late getting to King’s Cross Station, and, true to form (thanks to a thirty-five minute argument in which Hope had tried to force Remus to drink a third Pepper-Up Potion and Remus had frantically tried to dissuade her, lest he show up to the platform with his ears belching smoke) Remus had mere minutes to drag his trunk aboard the train before it left.

Hope followed his gaze and sighed. “I suppose you should get going. Come on, one last hug.”

Remus sandwiched himself between his parents. For a moment, he closed his eyes and inhaled the soft lavender scent of Hope’s perfume and the oaky traces of tobacco that trailed Lyall wherever he went. His body filled with warmth. In spite of all their nagging and fussing, Remus would miss his parents.

The shrill whistle of the train cut through the moment. Remus extricated himself and grabbed one handle of his trunk. Lyall rushed forward to grab the other. The full moon had only been two days ago, and, though he tried not to show it, Remus’s energy was still drained. Together, they hoisted the trunk up and Remus climbed aboard.

“Be good,” Lyall said, “and don’t forget to have fun.”

His face was serious, but the twinkle in his brown eyes told Remus that he was already expecting to hide several owls home from McGonagall from Hope’s worrying gaze.

“I will, Tad,” Remus grinned.

“Don’t forget to write!” Hope called after him, as the train lurched forward and started to move. Remus nodded and waved at her. He didn’t stop until the train had rounded the first bend, his parents swallowed from view.

Remus, it appeared, was one of the last few on the train. Most compartments had already been claimed by students who had sprawled out with games of Wizard Chess or Gobstones and were swapping stories of their summer escapades. Remus glanced in each for his friends, to no avail. He hadn’t seen any of them all summer. Peter had been put to work in his mother’s pub in Leeds; James had been dragged with his parents to visit relatives in Kolkata; and Sirius’s family, well, didn’t approve of him spending time with _filthy half-bloods_ like Remus. They had exchanged owls, of course, sometimes more than one a day, but it wasn’t the same. Remus ached with missing them.

“Hullo Remus,” Lily Evans greeted him, in the dozenth or so compartment he checked. Her tentative smile broadened when she peered behind him and saw that he was alone. Lily and Remus were on friendly terms, being the only two Gryffindors in their Arithmancy class, but Remus had noticed that Lily’s attitude towards him cooled distinctly when he was in the company of Sirius and James. “Did you have a good summer?”

“It was alright.” Remus tugged at the collar of his sweater, all too conscious of the fresh scar which crossed from his shoulder to his chin. “I’m glad to be back, though.”

Lily nodded fervently. “Same.”

She didn’t elaborate.

“Hello Alice,” Remus said, poking his head further into the compartment to greet the short-haired black girl who was spoon-feeding a toad on her lap. “Marlene.”

“Hi, Remus,” Alice Smythe said cheerfully. Marlene McKinnon, who was sitting upside down while flipping through a copy of _Beater’s Digest_ , scowled and muttered, “Bugger off, Loony.”

“Er, sorry,” Lily said, looking uncomfortable as Remus winced. “She’s still a sore over the, erm, incident from last year.”

Marlene had narrowly beaten Sirius out (no pun intended) for the only free Beater position on the Gryffindor Quidditch team the year prior. Sirius, who wasn’t used to losing at anything, had appeared to take the defeat gracefully—until the next morning, when an irate Marlene had come down to breakfast covered head-to-toe in maroon and gold polka dots. It had taken a whole week for the dots to fade from Marlene’s skin, despite Madame Pomfrey’s best efforts. Remus, Peter, and James had nothing to do with the prank — James, indeed, was offended that anyone would accuse him of such poor sportsmanship — but that hadn’t stopped Marlene from nurturing a grudge towards all four Marauders ever since.

“It’s fine,” Remus said. “I know Sirius can be…”

“A dunghole?” Marlene filled in.

“I was going to say a ‘sore loser,’” Remus said lightly. “But, er… yeah. I’m really sorry, Marlene. And James is too, he made Sirius swear he wouldn’t try out for the team this year if he wasn’t prepared to get cut.”

Marlene snorted, but she didn’t add any more insults, which Remus considered a victory. He turned back to Lily, who was shifting from foot to foot awkwardly.

“I should probably find my friends.”

“Probably,” Lily said. She opened and closed her mouth several times like she was considering adding something, but after a moment merely said, “It was good to see you, Remus.”

“You too, Lily, Alice… Marlene.”

Alice gave a cheerful wave, seemingly unperturbed by the tension between her classmates, and Remus set off once more.

Remus found his friends in the second-to-last compartment. Sirius, James, and Peter were crouching on the floor, surrounded by loose sheets of parchment covered in indecipherable scribbles.

“MOONY!” Sirius shouted when Remus walked in. He leapt up and tackled Remus in a hug, sending parchment flying. The force sent the two stumbling back into the door of the compartment. Blood rushed to Remus’s face; after four years, he was still barely used to having friends, much less friends with so much _enthusiasm_.

“I missed you too, Sirius,” Remus said, gently prying the black-haired boy off of him. He nodded to the hurricane of papers scattered throughout the compartment. “What’s all this?”

“Mischief,” Peter said seriously.

“It’s a record of all of the pranks we’ve pulled since first year,” James said. He pushed his glasses up, smudging ink all over his nose in the process.

“That’s an ambitious undertaking for nine in the morning.”

Remus tried to lift his trunk up to the rack, but he barely made it an inch off the ground before he had to abandon his efforts, his muscles sore and shaking. He grit his teeth, trying not to show how winded the simple effort had made him.

Sirius appeared behind him and hefted the trunk up without saying a word. Remus gave him a small smile, grateful to be back among people who didn’t need him to explain, who understood without looking at him like he was a china doll that might shatter under the slightest pressure. Sirius gave his shoulder a quick squeeze before squatting back down on the ground.

“It was Pete’s idea,” Sirius explained, and the blonde boy swelled with pride. “We were trying to figure out what our first prank of the year should be, only we kept pitching things that were too predictable, places we’d already pranked—“

“—like how everyone avoids the statue of Gregory the Smarmy after last year’s Niffler debacle—“ James interjected.

“—so we figured that if we laid it all out, wrote down every prank we ever pulled, and where, and on who, we’d be able to spot patterns, find our blind spots —“

“—because we’re _fourth years_ now, we can’t be pulling out the same old kid stuff, people expect better of us —“

“I don’t think that’s quite what McGonagall meant when she said that,” Remus said, his lips twitching. “But do go on.”

Peter handed him a stack of parchments marked with a snake that had a pair of very crudely drawn bollocks attached. “We’ve been very thorough about pranking the Slytherins. We’ve gotten everyone in our year at least once.”

“And Snivelly thrice, just for good measure,” Sirius added.

“We’ve hit the Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs evenly, too. But,” Peter continued, handing Remus another sheet of parchment. This one was almost empty, save for a surprisingly good doodle of a lion at the top. “We’ve barely ever pranked the Gryffindors.”

“Even if it is our own house, this hardly seems fair,” James said. “We are, if anything, equal-opportunity mischief-makers.”

“If you’re about to suggest an intra-Marauders prank war, count me out,” Remus said firmly. “I have enough to worry about without trying to make sure you lot don’t charm my pants into pudding when I’m not looking.”

“We would never!” Sirius drew a hand to his chest in mock-indignation.

“Pants into pudding, though,” mused James, stroking his chin, “that’s evil genius right there, write that down, Pete.”

“Seems like a waste of perfectly good pudding,” Peter muttered. He scribbled a note nevertheless.

“If not each other, then who?” Remus asked  
.  
“Think about it,” Sirius said. There was an excited gleam in his dark eyes that made something flip-flop in Remus’s stomach. “What’s the one part of Gryffindor tower we can’t get into? The one place that no one would be able to prove we touched?”

Remus’s eyes widened. “You’re not thinking —“

“That’s right,” James said. “We’re going to plant a prank right in the middle of the girls’ dormitory.”

James, Sirius, and Peter all beamed at Remus, waiting for his reaction.

“You do realize the girls are going to hate us for the rest of eternity?”

“Yes,” the three boys chorused.

“And that it’s going to be nearly impossible to pull off?”

“Yes.”

“And we’ll be breaking at least a dozen school rules in the process?”

“Yes.”

Remus sighed, dragging his hands over his face dramatically as he tried to hide the grin tugging up at his lips. “Alright, I’m in. What did you have in mind?”

Already, his mind was whirring, excitement mounting as he ran through all the possibilities, all the potential problems and pratfalls and how to avoid them. One thing was certain: this year was not going to be boring.


	2. The Audacious Archivist

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The arrival of the first-years grants James new prank inspiration. Meanwhile, the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher brings with him more questions than answers.

By the time the Hogwarts Express pulled into Hogsmeade, the four boys had papered the entire compartment from floor to ceiling with rejected prank ideas, all of them vetoed for complexity, illegality, or sheer impracticality, and many for a combination of the three. Remus had to remind Sirius on multiple occasions that, no matter how amusing it would be, there was no way they would be able to procure a sphinx by the end of term, much less smuggle it into the girls’ dormitory.

“We’ll get there,” James reassured them, determination ringing in his voice, as they joined the crowd rushing towards the carriages. “We can wait a week or two, let everyone think we’ve matured over the holidays—“ Remus snorted at this “—lull them into a false sense of — OI! Watch it!”

A boy ran into James’s shoulder, knocking loose his bag and sending their rejected pranks flying into the mud. Peter and Remus scrambled to grab them, but it was too late: they were soaked through.

When Remus looked up and saw the parchment-spoiler’s face, he wished he could Disapparate.

“Oops,” Severus Snape drawled. “Hard to balance with that big head of yours, is it, Potter?”

Remus braced himself. He loved James and Sirius, more than anything, so strongly it hurt sometimes. But every September 1st, there was a tiny part of him that hoped that this would be it: this would be the year they abandoned their blood feud with Snape, that for once in their stubborn, righteous, beautiful lives they would just _let it go_. Sure, the Slytherin gave as good as he got. But Remus couldn’t escape the nagging feeling that one day — and one day soon — it was all going to go too far.

“It’s remarkable you’re able to stand at all, _Snivellus_ ,” Sirius snapped back, “considering the great slippery grease puddles you leave everywhere.”

“It’s admirable, really, your commitment to avoiding showering. You look like you barely left your crypt this summer,” James added. Snape’s lip curled. His black eyes flickered over the crowd as his hand twitched towards his wand, as if assessing the risk of firing off a jinx in front of so many onlookers.

James’s comments were cruel, but Remus had to admit that he had a point. Where most students had developed a healthy summer glow over the past few months, Snape’s skin had somehow grown even more sallow, as if he had spent every moment avoiding the sun at all costs. Remus would have almost believed the rumor that spread their second year that Snape was a vampire, if he hadn’t known Sirius to be the originator of said rumor in the first place.

Snape was spared the trouble of finding a response by a freckled hand that gripped his robes.

“There you are!” Lily Evans gasped for breath, as if she had been sprinting to catch up with him. “I’ve been trying to find —“

She broke off when she saw Sirius and James.

“What’s going on?” Lily asked. She crossed her arms and scowled at the Marauders. Remus looked away guiltily, even though he knew he had done nothing wrong.

“Nothing,” Snape said coldly. 

“Really? Because it looks like they —“

“I said it was nothing,” Snape snapped. “Come on, let’s find a carriage.”

Lily shot them one last glare and turned on her heel to follow Snape.

The rest of the trip to Hogwarts passed uneventfully, and before Remus knew it he was staring longingly at the empty golden dishes as Professor McGonagall called out the names of the first-year students for the Sorting. His stomach growled. His mam had packed him a cold turkey sandwich for the train that he had immediately forgotten amidst the excitement of plotting.

“They look a bit squirrelly this year, don’t they?” Sirius remarked, rolling his fork between his fingers as he surveyed the incoming crop of first-years.

“Squirrelly?” Peter repeated.

“Yeah, like — y’know — all twitchy and nervous. Like they’d fall apart with one good jinx.”

“They’re eleven, Sirius,” Remus said, rolling his eyes, “they wouldn’t even know what a good jinx looks like.”

“And besides, didn’t you almost piss yourself during your Sorting?” James added with a smirk.

“Only because I like to stay properly hydrated! All I’m saying is that the Hat better not stick us with a bunch of would-be Hufflepuffs just because it likes to keep everything equal and balanced. Look at that one, she looks like she fell in the lake!”

He pointed with his fork towards a small girl with brown skin whose robes were dripping her a personal pond onto the stone floor.

McGonagall called out, “McKinnon, Dorothea!”

The waterlogged girl made her way towards the Sorting Hat. _Hufflepuff_ , Sirius mouthed with raised eyebrows.

“GRYFFINDOR!” the Sorting Hat cried. Dorothea beamed, and she sloshed over to the table to join her sister.

“Knew you could do it!” Marlene exclaimed. She grabbed the small girl in a fierce hug and almost immediately jerked away with a yelp. Remus barely held in a snort of laughter when Marlene pulled a small but furious crab from her hair.

“Longbottom!” Marlene snapped across the table.

“Hm?” Frank Longbottom, the Sixth Year Prefect, answered. His expression of feigned ignorance was betrayed by the burgeoning dimple in his cheek.

“A little help here?” Marlene dangled the crab in front of him with one hand and gestured towards Dorothea’s seaweed-covered robes with the other. “Unless you want to infest our dormitories with sea creatures before term starts.”

Frank raised his wand to help the first year out.

“That’s it!” James hissed, pounding his fist on the table.

Sirius blinked. “Er, what’s it, mate?”

“Our first prank of the year!”

“Crabs?” Peter asked.

“No, not crabs,” James said. “What if we transported the dorms _into the lake_?”

Sirius and Remus shared a look. Remus was slightly reassured that Sirius seemed to be exactly as unconvinced as he was.

“Come again?” Sirius asked.

“We wouldn’t have to actually move the dorms — I’m not sure if we could, come to think of it, seems like something there should be wards against — but we could charm the windows so it looks like they’re underwater, maybe even Transfigure the floor into sand!” James pushed his glasses up his nose. “Imagine Evans’s expression when she wakes up face-to-face with the Giant Squid.”

“That…” Remus said slowly, “… is the most diabolical thing I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s perfect,” Sirius confirmed, beaming, as Peter chirped, “Brilliant!”

“It’s going to be difficult,” Remus added, before he could watch James’s ego swell even further. “The spellwork should be simple enough, but it’s a lot of stuff you can’t do remotely… there are time-release glamour charms we could use, but there’s still the matter of actually getting them into the girls’ dormitories.”

“We’ll figure it out.” James waved his hand dismissively. And Remus knew they would.

The sudden appearance of the feast cut short any further prank discussions, as James dove face-first into a plate of candied yams.

“How on earth can people believe in Pureblood superiority when they haven’t even mastered the art of chewing with their mouths closed?” Lily muttered to Mary Macdonald, another fourth year Gryffindor, as she eyed James with disgust. Mary raised a blonde eyebrow and nodded her agreement.

The rest of the feast passed in a haze as Remus felt the warmth of a full stomach and the comfort of being back at Hogwarts wash over him. For the first time since the full moon, he felt himself relax. He barely remembered to take off his shoes before passing out on his bed.

The next day dawned bright and early and hummed with all the potential that only a new term could bring. The Gryffindors’ first class was Defense Against the Dark Arts. The door was closed and locked when the Marauders arrived, and the students (the fourth year Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs) crowded around, buzzing with speculation about what the new teacher would be like and what sorts of lessons he would bring. In all the flurry of plotting their inaugural fourth-year prank, Remus had missed Dumbledore’s introduction of the new Defense instructor entirely.

The previous year, their professor had been a tiny witch so old her skin was as translucent as parchment. She had been prone to falling asleep at inopportune moments, which was both exceedingly useful for pranking and exceedingly ineffective when it came to teaching them how to ward off Dark magic. Prior to her had been a lazy young man barely out of Hogwarts, whose lessons consisted of them reading textbooks for hours while he leafed through _Witch Weekly_ ; a former Chaser for the Tutshill Tornadoes who could be derailed by the slightest suggestion into lecturing about his “glory days” in Quidditch (James, it had to be said, found no fault with this, and Remus suspected that he still owled the man somewhat regularly); and a middle-aged witch who never spoke louder than a whisper, so half of class was spent surreptitiously applying Amplifying Charms just to make sure they caught the homework.

Needless to say, the bar for Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers was low.

“D’you think he’s going to be late on the first day?” Peter asked, checking his watch. Before he had even finished his sentence, the clock struck nine, and the door unlocked with a soft _click_.

“Enter!” a deep voice beckoned. James shared a glance with Remus and shrugged before pushing the door open.

When he stepped through the door, Remus couldn’t contain a gasp of wonder, and he wasn’t the only one. All around him, Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs alike were gaping at the sight of the room before them.

The Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom had been completely transformed. The walls were lined with bookshelves on three sides, each one filled to bursting with thick tomes. The third wall was inset with enormous stained glass windows lined with ancient texts in Latin, Greek, and Arabic. Glass cases containing floating spellbooks dotted the floor, and rather than rows of desks, overstuffed armchairs were strewn about at odd intervals.

“It’s a library,” Remus breathed.

“That’s it, James,” Sirius said, clapping his best mate on the shoulder. “We’ve lost Moony forever. He’s never leaving this room.”

“You know Hogwarts already has a library, right?” Peter asked with an amused smile.

“Har har,” Remus said, but it was difficult for him to muster any venom behind his words while standing in a room that was so completely and utterly perfect. He felt himself drawn towards the closest glass case and pressed his palm against it gently.

The book immediately slammed itself against the glass. It snapped at him as a noxious green smoke was emitted from its spine. Remus stumbled backwards and was steadied by a firm hand between his shoulder blades. Remus inhaled sharply. His senses were always on high alert the first few days after the moon, and he caught the heady scents of anise and earth that he knew belonged to Sirius.

“Thanks,” he muttered.

“I must ask you not to touch the specimens,” the same deep voice from before boomed out. “They are easily provoked.”

Remus had been so caught up in the room itself that he had failed to notice the man standing at the front of it. The new professor was tall and white, with dark hair that was slicked back and a matching mustache. He wore houndstooth salt and pepper robes adorned with a single blue feather in the breastpocket. A pair of round spectacles dangled from a chain on his neck.

“Please, take a seat,” he said, and the entire class scrambled to oblige. “My name is Professor Libris, and as Professor Dumbledore announced last night, I am your new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. I’m sure you are all wondering what may qualify me for this esteemed position. In summary: I have spent the past three decades of my life tracking down and restoring some of the most dangerous books of Dark magic known to Wizardkind, from the Library of Alexandria to the Villa of the Papyri. I know the ways in which danger can lurk like a coiled snake in between ink and paper; how death can be planted in a single syllable. Though often underestimated, books are, I believe, some of the most dangerous magic in existence.”

The classroom was so quiet Remus swore he could hear the mice scuffling in the walls. Even James and Sirius, who frequently considered themselves above such petty things as lessons and listening to teachers, were hanging on to Libris’s every word. As he spoke, Libris cast his shrewd gaze out over the students, and Remus had the chilling thought that he was cataloging them. When his crystalline blue eyes met Remus’s own, they narrowed sharply, and Remus’s breath caught in his throat.

_It’s nothing_ , he told himself. _He doesn’t even know your name yet_.

For the rest of the lesson, Libris split them into groups and assigned them each a caged text to observe. Remus, Peter, and Alice Smythe were shuffled over to a small black book labelled _Secrets of the Darke and Deepe_ that oozed purple goo.

“It’s, er, definitely contained in there, right?” Peter asked nervously. The goo seeped closer towards them. The droplets certainly seemed to be probing the edges of the case—for signs of weakness?

“I assure you, my enchantments are thorough and secure, Mr….?”

Peter jumped when Professor Libris appeared behind them. He carried with him a faint odor of dust and mildew, as if he himself had been unearthed from lost archives along with his books.

“Pettigrew, sir,” Peter said, when he had recovered. “Peter Pettigrew.”

Libris’s gaze glossed over Peter as soon as the words left his lips.

“Alice Smythe,” Alice offered up, but Libris’s eyes skimmed over her, too. They locked on Remus, and he felt a lead weight drop into his stomach.

“I’m Remus Lupin,” Remus croaked out. Something flashed in Libris’s eyes.

“So lovely to meet you,” he said. “I’m looking forward to getting to know each and every one of you as the term progresses. Now, Mr. Lupin, how long have you been at Hogwarts?”

Remus shared a dark look with Peter.

_Here we go_ , he thought.

“We’re fourth years,” Alice answered, oblivious to the pointedness of Libris’s question. Libris raised an eyebrow at Remus, as if daring him to contradict her.

“That’s right,” Remus said. “We’ve all been here four years.”

“Fascinating,” Libris breathed. Remus tried to turn his attention back to the purple ooze, which was now climbing the glass and threatening to obscure the book from view, but it was difficult with Libris hovering over his shoulder like a moth to flame.

“And have you found yourself facing many challenges at Hogwarts?” Libris asked him.

“I’m ruddy awful at Potions,” Peter jumped in, and Remus felt a rush of affection for his friend. Libris wasn’t so easily distracted. He kept his attention focused on Remus.  
“Potions, yes… have you noticed any strange interactions with certain ingredients? Or with any spells… or textbooks, perhaps?” Libris pushed.

Alice’s quill, which had been scratching steadily in her cheerful looping cursive, paused. Her wide brown eyes met Remus’s in confusion.

_Merlin’s sodding beard on a cracker_ , Remus thought. If he was about to be outed as a werewolf by a professor on the bloody first day of term, he would leap out one of those stained glass windows.

“No, sir,” Peter intervened again. Remus internally vowed to do Peter’s Charms homework for the next week to repay him. Libris turned his eerie blue eyes away from Remus at last to meet Peter’s forcibly cheerful expression. “We were all raised around magic, you see, we’re quite used to its effects.”

“Hmph.” Libris’s mouth and mustache turned down every so slightly. He seemed to realize that he wasn’t going to get anything out of Remus, at least during this class period, and he finally— _finally_ —moved on. Libris asked Alice a few questions about her family, perking up ever so slightly when she mentioned a great-aunt who had worked as a Cursebreaker for several Roman excavation sites, but his eyes kept gravitating back to Remus. Even after he had moved on to other groups, Remus could still feel his stare needling the back of his neck. When the bell finally rang, Remus bolted from the room, not even stopping to wait for his friends.

“Moony! Moony, wait up!” James grabbed him by the elbow, slowing his pace while Sirius and Peter caught up. “What’s up with you? You look like you’ve walked through a ghost.”

Remus licked his lips and looked around. They were several hallways over from the Defense classroom now, but Remus couldn’t shake the impression that, somehow, Libris was still watching him.

“I don’t like him,” Remus said quietly. “There’s something seriously off. If he specializes in restoring lost texts, what’s he doing at Hogwarts? I don’t see Madame Pince ceding her territory anytime soon.”

Remus shook his head, trying to throw off the prickling sensation at the back of his neck.

“He’s a librarian, Moony,” Sirius said, slinging an arm over Remus’s shoulder. “You love librarians!”

“I love libraries,” Remus corrected him. “And he’s not even a librarian, he’s an archivist, there’s a difference. Librarians work with people. Archivists avoid them.”

“You’re the one who’s always saying books are better than people,” Peter said with a shrug. “He seems like your kind of bloke.”

Remus shook his head. “The way he looked at me… it was like he wanted to trap me in one of those cases and add me to his collection. And he kept asking me all those questions… it was weird, right, Peter?”

“Well…” Peter looked uncomfortable and turned to James and Sirius for advice. The two black-haired boys exchanged a weighted glance.

“What?” Remus snapped. He wasn’t in the mood for James and Sirius’s best friend mind-reading act. Sirius raised an eyebrow, and James pulled a face before mouthing something that looked infuriatingly like your turn.

“It’s not as though,” Sirius said, and he spoke so slowly that it seemed each word was a tentative step in a minefield, “Libris is the first professor to be interested in your furry little problem.”

“But —“

“That doesn’t mean it’s right,” James added quickly. “And if he says a single word about it we’ll hex him six ways ’til Sunday, and you know that. But, Rem, you’re… in a unique position. He’s probably just curious.”

“Ah yes, an educated Dark Creature,” Remus said acidly. “How fascinating. Look, how it can stand on two legs! It can even read!”

“Moony—“

“Something doesn’t add up,” Remus pressed. “And besides, isn’t it a little too convenient that he’s an _archivist_ named _Libris_?”

Sirius’s barking laughter echoed through the corridor, while James and Peter at least had the dignity to mask their snorts as a series of violent sneezes. Their reactions only stoked Remus’s temper.

“What the hell is so funny?”

“It’s just…” James started, and his lips twitched again as he met Sirius’s eyes.

“That’s a bit rich of an observation coming from the boy named _Werewolf McWerewolf_ ,” Sirius barely managed to finish before the pair dissolved into laughter again.

“That’s a very unfortunate coincidence!” Remus hissed. He looked around to make sure no one had overheard, but the hallway was empty except for the four boys. “Fine, whatever, don’t believe me. But when Libris turns out to be a Dark wizard and tries to pin us all down like butterflies, it’s on your heads.”

Remus stormed off towards Arithmancy, ignoring his friends’ apologetic pleas behind him. The golden mood that had covered him since he stepped onto Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters yesterday had vanished. Suddenly, Remus wasn’t very excited to be back at Hogwarts at all.


	3. Quaffles and Quarrels

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Quidditch try-outs prove to be far more eventful than Madame Hooch anticipated.

Remus was the first one to Arithmancy. He took his regular seat at the front of the classroom, and then changed his mind and moved his stuff to the back. He didn’t think he could take anyone else staring at him, even if it was sweet old Professor Vector. His whole body felt clammy and shivery, like he was recovering from a particularly bad bout of the flu. He shouldn’t have yelled at his friends. He had never lost his temper with them before. Remus tried very hard to never lose his temper with _anyone_. When he gave in to emotion, when he snapped and snarled and fought, he didn’t feel like Remus anymore; he felt like the wolf.

As the other students started to trickle in, Remus forced himself to take a deep breath. It would be alright. After Arithmancy, he would go straight down to lunch and apologize to Sirius and James and sweet Peter, who, after all, had only been trying to help. They were right, as always. Just because Professor Libris appeared to be somewhat of a bigoted arsehole didn’t make him a Dark Wizard. If Remus wanted to survive the school year — and, hopefully, make it through Defense with a passable grade — he would have to suck it up.

“Are you alright?”

Remus jerked his head up as Lily Evans sat down beside him.

“Er, yeah, of course,” he said, forcing a smile. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You kind of booked it out of Libris’s class,” Lily said. Her bottle green eyes searched his and her nose crinkled with worry.

“Oh, that.” Remus waved his hand, trying to appear nonchalant. “I thought that I had left my copy of _Numerology and Grammatica_ in the dorm, but I realized halfway here that it had been in my bag all along. That’s all.”

“Are you sure?” Lily pushed, but unlike Libris, her tone was gentle and full of concern. “Alice told me he asked you lot some awfully odd questions.”

Remus was spared having to fumble for another lie by the arrival of Lily’s friend Dorcas, a fourth-year Ravenclaw. She had shaved her afro over the summer, and now wore her black curls cropped close to her head in a style that accentuated her high cheekbones. Dorcas plopped down beside them and leaned in conspiratorially.

“Did you just come from Libris’s class?” she asked eagerly, her mahogany eyes alight.

Lily and Remus nodded.

“Well?” Dorcas prompted. “What’s he like? Is he a nutter? I owe Silvia Murnane three galleons if he’s a nutter. She took one look at him and said he wouldn’t last half the term without cursing someone’s bits off.”

“He’s very… focused,” Lily said, still frowning slightly at Remus. “He’s an archivist, and he made it sound like the entire year would be spent covering Dark texts — which, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure is very important, but I’d like to learn about how to protect myself from all sorts of Dark magic, not just books.”

“Books are the most dangerous magic in existence,” Dorcas said solemnly.

“That’s exactly what he said!” Lily exclaimed. “Are you sure you haven’t had class yet?”

“No, I just did the reading, like a good little Ravenclaw,” Dorcas said, flashing Lily a brilliantly white smile. “What’s your assessment, Lupin?”

It took Remus a minute to realize that Dorcas was staring at him for confirmation. His mind had wandered back to the Defense classroom, and the way that Libris had stared at him like he was an ancient manuscript he was trying to decode.

“He’s fine,” Remus said simply. Lily raised one eyebrow, but she didn’t call him out, even if she could tell he wasn’t being altogether truthful.

After Arithmancy, Lily and Dorcas walked with Remus down to lunch, chatting about classes and that Saturday’s upcoming Quidditch tryouts.

“Please, Lils!” Dorcas begged her friend. “You’d be brilliant, I know it, and then we could grouse about how awful winter practice is and exchange all sorts of witty insults before games.”

“And subject myself to spending even more time with James Potter?” Lily shook her head, her red hair dancing with the movement. “No way. Classes are bad enough, but he gets ten times more obnoxious whenever he’s within three yards of a chance to show off on a broomstick — sorry, Remus,” she added hastily.

“It’s fine.” Remus gave her a wry smile. “I’m well aware that James isn’t exactly, er, modest.”

“He once told me that it was a shame he could only play Chaser, because he was so naturally gifted at everything that limiting him to one position was doing the Gryffindor team a disservice,” Dorcas drawled. Lily groaned.

“I would tell you that’s not how he meant it,” Remus said, “only I’m sure that’s exactly how he meant it.”

When they arrived at the Great Hall, Lily paused and asked, “D’you want to come sit with us at the Ravenclaw table?”

Remus’s gaze darted across the room. He wondered if sitting with Lily and Dorcas meant automatically sitting with Severus Snape. He doubted Lily had run this invitation past the Slytherin beforehand, and he doubted even more that Snape would be thrilled with his presence. “I promised Sirius and James and Peter I would sit with them already.”

“Oh.” Lily’s face fell. “Alright.”

“I’m sorry,” Remus said, and he meant it. “Maybe some other time?”

“Sure. Well… see you, Remus!”

“I’m sorry,” Remus said the moment that he sat down at the Gryffindor table.

“F’what?” James asked through a mouthful of ham sandwich. Remus frowned, glancing over at Sirius and Peter, who were similarly preoccupied with their lunch and didn’t seem to be looking at him with any sort of fear or lingering resentment.

“I snapped at you,” Remus said, “about Libris.”

“So?” Peter asked, shrugging.

“So?” Remus repeated blankly. “I — I shouted at you and then told you that if Libris murders us it’s all your fault!”

“You called that shouting?” James raised his eyebrows. “Merlin, we really need to break you out of your shell more if you call that _shouting_.”

“That’s the tone that my mother uses when she wants you to pass the salt,” Sirius agreed.

“So… you don’t hate me?”

James put down his sandwich with an uncharacteristic seriousness. “Of course not! If anyone should be apologizing, it’s us. Libris made you uncomfortable, and we should have listened, and if it happens again I’ll go straight to Dumbledore and try to get him sacked.”

“You really don’t have to do that,” Remus mumbled. “But thanks.”

“Any time,” Sirius said firmly. He held Remus’s gaze so long that Remus blushed.

“Anyway, want to see what we nicked from Care of Magical Creatures?” James pulled something out of his pocket and Remus groaned reflexively.

“Please tell me it’s not a magical creature.”

“No can do, Moony.” James held up a jar filled with murky green water, in which floated a dozen thick white bubbles — except no, they were thicker than bubbles — they were pearls, maybe, but they were too translucent — they were —

“Flying seahorse eggs,” Peter said with a triumphant grin. “We’re raising them for Kettleburn’s class and figured he wouldn’t notice a few missing.”

“They take about a month to mature, which gives us plenty of time to figure out how to get them into the girls’ dormitories,” James added. “And all they eat is lacewing flies, which we can grab from ole Sluggy’s stores this afternoon.”

“That’s… actually not a bad plan,” Remus admitted. Flying seahorses were harmless, as far as magical creatuers went — they didn’t bite, their skin wasn’t poisonous, and they didn’t cause passersby to faint or hallucinate — and when fully grown, they were spectacular to behold. They could get as tall as two feet and could be seen flitting about the lake on their massive, iridescent wings. He grinned as he imagined a whole herd of them bobbing about the girls’ dormitory.

Figuring out the rest of the prank, however, would have to wait. Every class for the rest of the week kicked off with a stern warning from their professors that this was the last year before O.W.L. coursework started and slacking off would not be tolerated. James and Sirius might have been able to get away with doing everything at the last possible moment, but Remus found himself spending every free moment with Peter in the library, surrounded by a sea of textbooks and a never-ending To-Do list. He was eagerly anticipating the first Saturday of term, hoping that he could knock out at least his Ancient Runes and Arithmancy essays, if not Transfiguration and practicing the Aguamenti Charm for Flitwick, but he had forgotten one very important event: Quidditch tryouts.

Sirius was the only one of the Marauders trying out (James having already secured his position as Chaser; Peter suffering from an extreme fear of heights; and Remus believing that facing one life-threatening scenario per month was quite enough, thank you), but that didn’t stop James from waking the entire dormitory at the crack of dawn.

“UP AND AT ‘EM, GENTS!” James shouted. He blew a silver whistle he must have lifted from Madam Hooch the previous year and Remus winced.

“We’re not even trying out,” Peter whinged from his four-poster. “Why do we have to be punished too?”

“You want to give Sirius moral support, don’t you? You want to be there to cheer for his successes and lament his failures — not that there will be any failures,” James added quickly as Sirius chucked a pillow at him. “See? Look at those reflexes. You’re a natural. You should bypass the Gryffindor team altogether and just try out for the professional leagues.”

The only witty comeback Sirius had was another pillow to James’s face, which told Remus how nervous the other boy really was. At breakfast, he exchanged friendly barbs with the other Gryffindor Quidditch hopefuls, but even as he puffed out his chest and gave Alexia Turpin a cocky wink, Remus noticed how he barely touched his toast.

“You’re gonna be great,” Remus murmured to him as they made their way down to the Quidditch Pitch. Sirius only nodded in response. Remus tentatively reached out to give his arm a quick squeeze before he and Peter turned towards the stands.

There were two openings on the Gryffindor Quidditch Team this year: the Beater position that Sirius coveted, and the Seeker. Nearly two dozen students had showed up to tryouts. They ranged in size and age from a cluster of timid-looking second years, who all looked like they might faint if a Bludger so much as looked at them wrong, to a crop of burly seventh-years that Remus had only seen in passing. Sirius was clutching his broom so tightly his knuckles were practically glowing white.

“Warm ups,” barked the Captain, a no-nonsense seventh-year named Birgit Choi. “Three laps around the pitch on your brooms, then two end-to-end sprints — _on foot_ — and then back in the air for some Fortlesby Figures to finish it off. If you don’t know what a Fortlesby Figure is, you can go ahead and leave now. I’m here to build a team, not to teach you what end of the broom is up.”

Choi paused for effect, surveying the gathered crowd with one perfectly-arched eyebrow raised. Several of the second years exchanged nervous glances before turning and running off the pitch.

“Anyone else? No? Right then, off you go.”

Remus kept his eyes on Sirius as the hopefuls all pushed off into the air. Despite his nerves, the black-haired boy was clearly experienced on a broom, and it didn’t hurt that he was riding one of the best that money could buy. While some of the other students were attempting to wrangle school brooms that seemed reluctant to leave the ground, Sirius’s Silver Arrow (courtesy of the Potters on Sirius’s thirteenth birthday) appeared to barely need guidance at all. He finished the first three laps before all of the other hopefuls, and mere hairs behind James and Marlene.

“Morning, Lupin, Pettigrew.” Dorcas Meadowes slid onto the bench next to them. She clutched a steaming thermos between her hands and Remus caught the heavy scent of coffee. He wished he had thought to bring some. Though still early in September, the sun hadn’t been up long enough to suck the chill from the air, and Remus thought longingly of his bed. “How’s it looking?”

“What are you doing here?” Peter asked her suspiciously. “Aren’t you in Ravenclaw? I thought your try-outs weren’t until this afternoon.”

“I’m here to scope out the competition, of course,” Dorcas said, taking a long swig from her thermos. “The best way to build a team is to base it off of your opponent’s weak spots.”

“Well you’re out of luck,” Peter said. “Gryffindor doesn’t have any weak spots.”

“Oh, really?” Dorcas asked dryly, as Alexia Turpin flew the wrong way on a Fortlesby Figure and collided head on with Frank Longbottom, the Gryffindor Keeper. The three of them winced.

“That’s not a weak spot,” Peter said hastily. “Turpin isn’t even on the team!”

But Dorcas wasn’t looking at Longbottom, who was cradling a broken nose, or Turpin, who had started sobbing hysterically. Dorcas’s eyes were narrowed at the entrance to the pitch, where a cluster of students in green and silver robes had appeared.

“That’s not good,” she muttered. Her hand hovered above her wand.

“Get off the pitch, Macnair,” Birgit Choi snapped at the Slytherin Quidditch Captain, who was quickly approaching flanked by a half-dozen of his teammates. Walden Macnair was a seventh year with a broad chest and chiseled features that might have been attractive on someone who was not currently growing out six whole hairs of a mustache.

“I told you before, Choi,” Macnair called with a casual air, ignoring the Gryffindor Captain’s demand. “If you want to avoid nasty little _accidents_ like that, you need to ban them altogether. Flying is too overwhelming magic for their weak systems.”

“Who d’you mean by ‘they,’ dungface?” James flew down to hover next to Choi. The rest of the team followed, along with several of the hopefuls, including Sirius. A scowl drew James’s eyebrows together, and Remus saw his whole body tense as he waited for Macnair’s answer. Remus’s gaze flickered towards Madame Hooch, but she was napping in the teachers’ box and looked like nothing short of an apocalypse could wake her.

Choi raised a hand in warning.

“Steady, Potter,” she told him. Her jaw was clenched. “Macnair, I booked the pitch with Professor McGonagall until noon. If you have an issue with that, you can take it up with her yourself. If not, you can watch from the stands like everyone else. Don’t make me ask you to leave again.”

Macnair ignored her again. He looked directly at James, his dark eyes glinting with malice. Remus’s stomach did a terrible flop.

“I’m talking about the Mudbloods, of course.”

It was impossible to tell who shot the first spell, or even how many spells were shot at all. No fewer than six beams of light, all different colors, arced towards Macnair and hit him square in the chest. He stumbled backwards, his nose erupting with blood, and his Slytherin lackeys immediately advanced. One of them shot a Stunner at James, who rolled over on his broom to avoid it almost lazily and fired back with _Tarantellagra_. Dorcas leapt off her seat to join the fray, conjuring a rainbow of jinxes as she sprinted down the stairs. Sirius shot off a half-dozen Stinging Hexes, and Frank Longbottom hastily covered the entire Gryffindor Team with a series of Shield Charms. Remus stood up and joined him from the stands, managing to cover Alexia Turpin with a shaky spell just before a particularly brutish-looking Slytherin shot something that looked suspiciously worse than a Jelly-Legs Jinx directly at her heart. The curse bounced off and Remus blew a sigh of relief before casting another charm in front of a small third-year who was frozen with fear. Spells flew in every direction.

“What in Merlin’s name is going on here?”

Madame Hooch had awoken at last.

Birgit Choi ran a hand through her short black hair with a heavy sigh. “There was a… scuffle, Madame Hooch.”

“A scuffle?” Madame Hooch eyed the mostly-unharmed Gryffindor Team and the several badly-hexed Slytherins. Macnair had gotten the brunt of it: in addition to his bloody nose, his finely-featured face had erupted into boils, and Remus swore he could see a writhing tentacle creeping its way out of his sleeve.

“Macnair provoked us,” James piped up. “We were in the middle of tryouts and his team stormed the field and started calling some of us M — y’know, the _m-word_.”

Madame Hooch narrowed her eyes at Choi. “Is that correct?”

Choi nodded. “That’s right. I asked Macnair nicely to leave the pitch, but he refused, and that’s when he started insulting my team.”

“They attacked us first!” Macnair cut in, jabbing a finger at Sirius, who was looking murderous. “My team was only coming to my defense after six — _six!_ — Of them tried to curse me. I barely got my wand out in time, it’s lucky I’m still standing.”

“We can change that,” Sirius growled.

“A week’s detention,” Madame Hooch declared, “and ten points from the house of everyone who fired a spell — no, I don’t care that they started it, Macnair, you deliberately ignored Choi’s request to vacate the premises and used several _highly_ forbidden curses.” She shook her head. “I cannot believe this behavior! Eighteen witches and wizards engaged in a boorish brawl, and it’s not even the first week of term.”

Madame Hooch turned to the stands, where Remus still had his wand arm raised. He lowered it guiltily.

“That includes you, Mr. Lupin, don’t think I missed your involvement from the stands.”

“Please, Madame Hooch,” Choi cut in. “Don’t punish Longbottom or Lupin. They were just trying to make sure no one got hurt — they only fired Shield Charms, I saw it.”

Several other Gryffindors, including James and Marlene, nodded in response. Madame Hooch cocked her head to the side like a bird pondering its prey before she replied,

“Alright. You’re both off with a warning, but the rest of you, I want you to report to my office at seven o’clock sharp every day for the next week. And Choi?  
”  
“Yes, Madame Hooch?”

“Please take the selection of your new team seriously. I will not have pitch-side duelling become the new standard.”

“Yes, Madame Hooch.” Choi paused before adding quickly, as if afraid Madame Hooch might change her mind, “May we finish try-outs, at least?”

Hooch considered, and then nodded. “I think you may. But anyone who is not participating must return to the castle. I don’t want anyone getting tempted towards round two.”

“Yes, of course,” Choi said. She shot Macnair and his cronies a withering glare. “Thank you.”

Remus and Peter reluctantly headed back up to the castle. They walked in silence for several minutes, Remus’s heart still racing from the fight, before Peter stopped suddenly. Remus turned to face him. Peter’s brow was creased and his teeth worried his upper lip.

“Am I a coward?” he asked, so softly that it took Remus a minute to decipher what he had said.

“Of course not,” Remus said automatically. Peter’s frown remained etched into his forehead, but he didn’t offer up any further explanation, so Remus prodded, “Why d’you think that?”

“Because I didn’t do anything when the Slytherins attacked.” Peter stared down at his trainers. “James and Sirius didn’t hesitate. Dorcas ran down to fight. Even you stood up and started protecting people, but I… I just stood there. It was like I was hit with a Body-Bind. Everything went cold, and my heart started to race, and I knew, I _knew_ that people I cared about were going to get hurt, but the more I thought about that, the more I was frozen, and I couldn't breathe, and then… then it was over, and I hadn’t done a damn thing.”

Remus looked at Peter, really looked at him, and his heart hurt for the gentle boy who was always there to support him; who slipped a chocolate frog onto his pillow after every full moon; who had stuck up for him in front of Libris in his own quiet way.

“I think,” Remus said slowly, “sometimes, courage can take practice. It’s easy to look at people like James and Sirius and think that’s all courage is — the kind that comes without thinking, the kind that’s all about being bold and brash and acting damn the consequences. But for the rest of us, courage is something that we have to work on, something we have to wake up and try for day after day after day. And it’s okay if it doesn’t come naturally to you right now,” Remus added, reaching over to squeeze Peter’s shoulder. “Your heart is in the right place, and that’s all that matters.”

Remus wasn’t entirely sure he believed what he was saying — having a heart “in the right place” couldn’t stop a hex, after all — but he knew it was what Peter needed to hear. And, after all, Peter had been Sorted into Gryffindor. There was courage there, even if it was buried a bit deeper below the surface than most. Remus had seen glimmers of it. He just needed Peter to believe in it, too.


	4. Lurking in the Library

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Late night research by Remus and James leads to an unnerving discovery. Marlene McKinnon owes Sirius Black a mysterious favor, and Remus is having some capital-F Feelings about it.

Later that afternoon, James and Sirius returned to the Common Room with triumphant smiles on their faces, the nasty business with the Slytherins long forgotten in the wake of their victory: Sirius was the Gryffindor team’s newest Beater.

“And thank Merlin,” Marlene McKinnon said loudly from across the Common Room, where she was recounting tryouts to Lily and Mary Macdonald. “Because if I had to take the brunt of Black’s bruised ego again, I’d cover his bollocks in something a lot less pleasant than polka dots.”

“Like you could ever land a hex on me,” Sirius shouted back, but he was still grinning.

The start of term had taken a decided turn for the better. Sirius and James’s good moods lasted for the rest of the week, even with their nightly detentions. The flying seahorses had hatched from their eggs several days ago, in a flurry of popping that sounded exactly like bubble wrap, a comparison which had led to Remus explaining for twenty minutes what exactly bubble wrap was and what Muggles used it for. It only ended when he promised to have his mam owl some for Sirius to properly examine. Remus had rolled his eyes and pretended to be annoyed, but he found Sirius’s fondness for Muggle inventions quite endearing.

The flying seahorses were just over two inches long now and bobbed up and down inside of a long tank that, in a poetic move, James had Transfigured from a spare copy of _Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them_.

Remus had managed to perfect the time-lapse Glamour Charm the week before, planting one on a tureen at lunch that caused Sirius to take a very large sip of ketchup instead of pumpkin juice. They had decided to affix the charm to a hairbrush, an innocuous enough object that could be planted in the girls’ dormitories without suspicion. The hairbrush would launch a series of Glamour Charms and Summon the flying seahorses when the codephrase (“time to get wet,” chosen, of course, by Sirius) was uttered. Only one problem remained: how to get the hairbrush into the dorms in the first place.

They had tried levitation charms, but the girls’ staircase curved, and the levitation charm failed as soon as the hairbrush was out of view. They had tried affixing the hairbrush to a letter and asking James’s owl Plumpton (named after Roderick Plumpton, the famed former Seeker for the Tutshill Tornadoes) to deliver it. Plumpton, either due to a preventative charm on the dormitories or one of the fits of stubbornness that the owl was prone to, had merely dropped it in the lap of a very confused Alice Smythe at breakfast. It was exceedingly frustrating, Sirius often groused in the Common Room while glaring at the girls’ staircase, to be both so close and so far from the greatest prank of their career so far.

“There’s got to be a loophole,” James muttered one day, as he sprinkled lacewing flies over the mesh covering the tank. Sirius was in detention yet again, this time for blowing up Snape’s cauldron halfway through Potions and causing the other boy to sprout hairy tarantula legs. Peter was down in the Common Room struggling through a Herbology essay with Alice Smythe. Alice had the dual qualities of being exceedingly talented at Herbology and possessing endless amounts of patience, both of which, Remus knew from experience, were required for helping Peter with any kind of homework.

The seahorses nipped at one another as they crowded around his hand to catch the dried bugs. Their wings caught the late afternoon light and sent rainbows dancing around the dormitory. “Right? Tell me I’m right, Rem, and this isn’t completely useless.”

“I’m sure this isn’t completely useless and Godric Gryffindor definitely made sure to install a loophole for male students millennia in the future to torment the girls without physically entering the dorms,” Remus said, without looking up from his tattered copy of _The Fellowship of the Ring_. Sirius, always eager for an excuse to go gallivanting around Muggle shops, had told him a thousand times that he could just buy him a new copy, but this one had been Remus’s mam’s, and he enjoyed running his fingers over the notes she had scrawled in the margins and the creases from where she had dog-eared a page to pause.

“That’s the spirit!” James either didn’t notice Remus’s lack of enthusiasm or chose not to comment on it. Remus suspected it was the latter. James whirled around suddenly with an excited gleam in his eye. “Hey — spirits! D’you think we could get a ghost to plant the glamour charms?”

Remus held in an eye-roll. Somedays, it felt as though James’s Pureblood upbringing had imbued him with knowledge that Remus would never catch up with, even as a half-blood; somedays, James had the magical sense of a banana. “Ghosts aren’t corporeal, they couldn’t carry things for us even if they tried. The only spirits who might be able to help us out are ghouls or poltergeists — and,” Remus added quickly, when James perked up, “I don’t fancy our odds with Peeves.”

“What about a ghoul?” James prodded.

Remus shook his head. He flipped the page. “They’re impossibly dense. There’s a good chance they’d misunderstand and plant the charms in our dorms instead.”

“What about a boggart?” James asked, his tone increasing in desperation. Remus didn’t bother responding to that one.

“There is one place we haven’t searched for answers yet,” Remus said, putting his book down at last. “I think it’s time to get out your invisibility cloak.”

As Sirius was still in detention, and Peter would likely not resurface from his Herbology homework for another three hours, the task of breaking into the Restricted Section was left to James and Remus. 

“Where are you going?” Lily stood up as they crossed the Common Room, the Invisibility Cloak tucked safely into James’s bag.

“Out for a walk,” James said. His voice was a half-note too high to be casual. Lily’s brilliantly green eyes narrowed.

“It’s almost curfew.”

“A short walk.”

James beamed at her. Lily scowled. Remus mouthed I’m sorry with an apologetic shrug as he followed James out of the Common Room. As soon as the Fat Lady’s portrait closed behind them, James rolled his eyes.

“Can’t believe she has the nerve to get on me about curfew when I know for a fact that she and Smythe snuck down to the kitchens every night during exams last year.”

James was still moaning about Lily’s hypocrisy when they arrived at the library.

“Y’know, if I didn’t know better, from the way you rant about Evans, I’d say you fancied her,” Remus said with a smirk as they threw the Invisibility Cloak over their heads.

“Me?” James spluttered. “Fancy _Evans_? Merlin, Rem, don’t be ridiculous, she’s — she’s _Evans_!”

“Whatever you say.”

Remus and James had grown several inches a piece over the summer, and they quickly found they had to be even more careful than usual when they walked so the cloak wouldn’t slip up and reveal their ankles. They had never been able to fit all four Marauders under the cloak, but now Remus thought they would be lucky to fit three.

Madame Pince was busy chasing the last of the students out of the library before closing time and didn’t notice the door open and close. Remus and James huddled in a corner until the candelabras were all extinguished. When they heard the click of the library door locking for the night, James flung the cloak off them and they made a beeline for the Restricted Section.

“Right, so,” James said, raising his _Lumos_ -lit wand, “what’re we looking for? Some kind of complicated modification on a Banishing Charm, that might work.”

“Maybe some kind of portal spell?” Remus mused. “If we could create a magical doorway between our dorms and the girls—“

He broke off suddenly. “Get under the cloak.”

“What?”

“Someone’s coming, get under the cloak!”

James muttered a hasty _Nox_ and threw the cloak around them. They pressed against the shelves as footsteps approached. Remus held his breath as he waited to see Madame Pince’s vulture-like face appear around the corner.

But it wasn’t Madame Pince. It was Macnair, the Slytherin Quidditch Captain, accompanied by two other Slytherins that Remus recognized at once: Sirius’s younger brother Regulus and Severus Snape. All three of them held their lit wands aloft.

“Keep looking all you want, it’s not going to be here,” Snape whispered with a disdainful sneer. “Even if Libris is right and it is at Hogwarts, Dumbledore wouldn’t be so foolish as to leave it somewhere anyone could grab it.”

A shudder ran down Remus’s spine at the sound of Libris’s name.

“It’s called hiding in plain sight,” Macnair hissed back. “And besides, what if it was here all along, but no one bothered to check? Who would be foolish then?”

Snape crossed his arms but didn’t respond.

“What’s that up there?” Macnair raised his wand towards a book on the top shelf that appeared to be splattered with bloodstains.

“ _Dismemberment: A Practical Guide for Inquisitive Warlocks_ ,” Regulus read aloud. “I’ll pass, thanks.”

Remus was struck, as he often was, by how similar the boy looked to his brother. They shared the same high cheekbones and grey, monolid eyes. The biggest difference was in their mouths. They were the same shape, the same shade of blushing pink, but where Sirius’s lips were often split in a shit-eating grin, Regulus’s were more likely to be found in an arrogant pout.

Macnair examined Regulus with a look of faint surprise. “Why didn’t you try out for the Quidditch team? We could use a Seeker with your eyesight.”

Regulus swelled with pride.

“Focus,” Snape hissed. “We’re not here to find you a bloody Seeker.”

The trio started moving down the aisle. Remus and James exchanged a glance. The shelves were too close together. They were going to have to move, or the Slytherins were going to run right into them. Slowly, painstakingly, James and Remus started shuffling backwards.

They had almost made it to the end of the row when the cloak caught on the jagged cover of a particularly nasty-looking book. The book let out an ear-splitting screech and Remus and James froze.

The three Slytherins whipped around. Snape and Macnair both fired off spells that missed James and Remus by inches.

“What was that?” Regulus asked. His voice was level, but his wide eyes betrayed his fear. Macnair glared into the darkness, his wand still raised. Remus didn’t dare breathe. His heart was pounding so loudly he knew Macnair could hear it, that they were seconds away from being discovered. It was all well and good to duel the Slytherins on the Quidditch pitch when they were outnumbered by Gryffindors five to one; Remus and James’s odds against Snape, Regulus, and Macnair in the darkened library seemed far less optimistic.

But then Macnair shrugged, dismissing Regulus’s fear with a wave of his hand.

“Probably just a book. The Dark magic that’s trapped in these pages… no wonder it’s all howling to get out…”

Macnair resumed scanning the shelves, but Regulus didn’t look convinced, and neither did Snape.

“Potter has an Invisibility Cloak,” Snape said suddenly. Remus felt James’s hand twitch towards his wand. He muttered a silent prayer to whatever gods were listening that James wouldn’t blow their cover just to hex the Slytherin.

“It’s always Potter this, Potter that,” Macnair drawled. “Tell me, Snape, have you picked out the ring you’re going to propose with yet?”

Snape turned an ugly shade of red. “But what if he—“

“Can we get on with the search, now?” Macnair said impatiently. “I would quite like to get this over with so we can tell Libris it was a bust and go to bed.”

As soon as the three Slytherins’ attention was diverted, Remus and James inched towards the edge of the Restricted Section and bolted out of the library. They didn’t take the Invisibility Cloak off until they were safely back outside Gryffindor Tower.

“Serendipity!” Remus gasped to the Fat Lady. They scrambled into the Common Room.

Both Peter and Sirius were waiting for them when they reached the boys’ dorms. James quickly recounted what they had seen, while Remus went over to his nightstand and pulled out a bar of chocolate. The whole affair had left a sickening taste in his mouth. 

“What d’you reckon they were looking for?” Peter asked, gaping at James.

“It’s got to be a book,” James said. “Why else would he have those goons searching the library?”

“But Libris is a teacher,” Sirius said, frowning. “He can get into the Restricted Section whenever he likes. Why would he need the Slytherins to sneak in after hours? Unless —“

“He doesn’t want anyone to know what he’s looking for,” Remus finished. He pressed another piece of chocolate onto his tongue and let it melt. It was a trick his mam had taught him when he was a little boy, when he would wake in the middle of the night from dreams of blood and teeth that left him sweat-soaked and paralyzed with fear. He imagined his anxieties melting along with the chocolate.

“It’s something Dark, I bet,” James said. “They’re not exactly hiding rainbows and unicorns in the Restricted Section, are they?”

Sirius cocked his head at Remus. “He was asking you all sorts of weird questions in class.”

Remus shifted uncomfortably as both James and Peter turned to look at him too. He swallowed down the last sweet dregs of chocolate. “And?”

“Maybe whatever he’s looking for has something to do with your furry little problem,” Peter said.

“If he wanted to learn what it’s like to be a Dark Creature, he could just give me detention and ask,” Remus snapped. Peter winced, and he immediately regretted it. He took a deep breath and forced down his anger. He hated how easily Libris got under his skin. More than that (though he knew it hadn’t been intentional), he hated how easily Sirius’s mind had jumped from Dark Magic to him. “Besides, there aren’t many books on werewolves.”

“That we know of,” Sirius said, raising his eyebrows.

“Trust me, I know them all,” Remus answered darkly. His father had been obsessive about it in the first years after he’d been bitten. He was gone every other day on mad searches for something, anything that could help his son, hopping from Japan to Yugoslavia chasing a whisper of a rumor of a cure. Once, Lyall came back from Greece with a handwritten book so ancient it looked like it could have been contemporary with Merlin, whose crumbling pages prescribed Remus eighteen raw Flobberworms a day in the week leading up to the full moon. Remus could still feel their wet skin sliding down his throat.

The cure, of course, had done nothing.

“Well, whatever it is,” James said finally, “if Dumbledore’s hidden it, we’ve got nothing to worry about. There’s no way Libris stands a chance against the greatest wizard who ever lived.”

“No way!” Peter echoed. Remus’s unease wasn’t so easily settled. From the glint in Sirius’s eyes, Remus knew the other boy felt the same, and he was willing to bet this discussion wasn’t closed for good.

“Shame we didn’t get a chance to look for more books for the prank,” James said, flopping back onto his bed. “I think you were on to something with that portal idea, Rem.”

Sirius snapped his fingers. “That reminds me! Marlene McKinnon.”

“Er, sorry?”

“That’s how we smuggle the hairbrush into the girls’ dorms. I asked McKinnon, and she said she’d do it.”

“That’s brilliant!” Peter exclaimed. Remus wasn’t so easily swayed. He frowned at James, who was looking equally hesitant.

“Why would she help us prank her dormmates?” James asked.

Sirius waved his hand. “She owes me a favor. I ran into her on my way back from detention and she — well, it’s not important. But she’s going to help us.”

“Okay,” Remus said slowly, “but she’s not exactly, er, fond of you.”

“Last detention, she told you to ‘Go fuck a Hippogriff,’” James pointed out. “What if it’s a trap, and she’s setting us up to be pranked instead?”

“It’s not a trap.”

“It really sounds like it’s a trap,” Remus said. The look of excitement was drooping from Peter’s face as his eyes flickered between James and Sirius.

“Look,” Sirius said, a note of impatience scraping in his voice, “d’you want to prank the girls or not?”

“Yes, but —“

“Then you’ve got to trust me on this. And Marlene.”

James ran his hands through his hair and sighed. “Alright. Fine. But if this blows up in our face, I’m chucking all of your stuff in the lake, and it won’t just be a Glamour Charm.”

Sirius nodded. “Deal.”

Remus tried to ignore the prickling feeling in his stomach, but the curiosity — and something darker, sharper — gnawed away at him. What had Sirius been doing with Marlene McKinnon after dark that had led him to be so confident in her? What was so big of a secret that he wouldn’t even tell his best friends?

And why on earth did it bother Remus so much?


	5. O. H.E.L.L.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Professor Libris continues to act suspiciously, but Remus is more concerned by what's happening between Sirius and Marlene. The full moon cares for no one's preoccupations.

As Remus predicted, neither Sirius nor James were ready to give up on what they overheard in the Restricted Section. They dubbed it “Operation Hitherto Exposing Libris’s Lies,” which Sirius had come up with as an excuse to talk dramatically about “the O. H.E.L.L. Mission.” They had tabled the prank until the first week in October, when the flying seahorses would be completely matured. The four Marauders agreed it would be most spectacular with the seahorses at their full height, and they also enjoyed watching teachers and students alike begin to squirm as they got further and further into term without causing any mischief.

As they neared the end of September, the Head Girl Emmeline Vance had taken to pacing up and down along the Gryffindor Table every meal, as if she could catch them in the act.

“See something you like, Vance?” Sirius asked, tilting as far back in his seat as he could without falling over and flashing the Head Girl a winning smile.

“You’re up to something, Black,” Vance said, “and I’m going to find out what.”

“Think it’s too late to get the Ravenclaw dorms too?” Sirius muttered to James when Vance had moved on. James wasn’t listening, however; he was paused with his spoon halfway to his mouth, staring at the end of the table with a glazed-over expression on his face.

“James? James!” Sirius snapped his fingers in front of the messy-haired boy’s face.

“He was staring at Lily again,” Remus said with a smirk. James rounded on them with a scowl.

“I was only staring because you —“ he jabbed his finger in Remus’s face “— got in my head about it.”

Peter swiveled his head between James and the redhead at the end of the table. “Wait… James, do you fancy Evans?”

“No! I mean, sure, she’s smart and she’s fit — she’s probably the fittest bird at this school, have you seen those legs?— and her eyes are, well, they’re incredible, but — no! She’s _Evans._ ”

Peter met Remus’s eyes and the two snickered. “If you say so.”

“Oi, you four!”

James was spared from having to fumble for a response as Marlene McKinnon plunked down next to them and immediately stole a forkful of Sirius’s eggs, which made Remus’s stomach contract in all sorts of confusing ways.

“When are we doing it?”

“Keep your voice down!” James hissed. He glanced towards the end of the table again, and Remus didn’t miss that his eyes lingered on Lily as he did so. “Soon, alright, it’ll be soon, we just… need a bit more time.”

“Mary’s getting suspicious,” Marlene said. “She misplaced her hairbrush and I had to come up with some elaborate lie for why she couldn’t use mine, only I don’t think she bought it and now she keeps looking at it like it’s going to sprout legs. It’s not going to sprout legs, is it?”

Marlene narrowed her deep brown eyes at the four Marauders.

“It won’t sprout legs,” Remus confirmed. “You don’t have to lie to Mary — it’s still a perfectly functional hairbrush. It’s not going to do anything until we say the codeword.”

“Which is….?” Marlene fished. When no one replied, she blew a strand of long black hair out of her face with a deep sigh. “Sorry lads, I had to ask. Just do it soon, alright?”

“You’re not getting cold feet, are you, McKinnon?” Sirius asked with a cocked eyebrow.

“Never.” She flashed Sirius a grin and snatched another bite of egg. Remus’s stomach contracted again. Just a few weeks ago, the only time Marlene spoke to the Marauders was to threaten to jinx them, and now she was joking with Sirius and stealing bites of his breakfast? He glanced at James and then at Peter, neither of whom seemed to be the slightest bit concerned with this sudden development. “But soon, yeah? How about next weekend?”

“Can’t,” James and Sirius said at once.

“Why not?”

All three boys glanced not-so-subtly at Remus, and Remus was left thinking, once again, that it was a miracle the whole bloody school didn’t know his secret by now. He held in an eyeroll and stepped in to play his part.

“I’ve got to go home to see my mum,” Remus said. “She’s very ill, so I’ll probably be gone until Sunday.”

“Oh.” Marlene’s face froze, like she couldn’t quite figure out how to react. “I, er, I’m… I’m sorry, Lupin.”

Remus shrugged and gave her a smile that he hoped looked equal parts sad and resigned. “It’s fine. But next weekend won’t work.”

“We were thinking the first Tuesday in October, actually,” Sirius chimed in. He nudged Remus’s leg under the table as if in solidarity, and Remus felt a rush of warmth towards the other boy.

“That’s oddly specific,” Marlene grumbled.

“Tuesdays are the least suspicious day,” Peter said authoritatively. “No one ever suspects a prank to come on a Tuesday.”

“Er… if you say so?” Marlene said. She appeared to be satisfied, though, because with one last stolen bite of Sirius’s breakfast, she left.

“She’s not bad, when she’s not trying to hex us,” James mused. Remus busied himself with his porridge. He found, quite suddenly, that he did not want to see Sirius’s reaction.

With the prank squared away, the Marauders turned their full attention to the O. H.E.L.L. Mission.

Remus found himself torn between wanting to keep his head down and trusting Dumbledore to keep this mysterious book (or whatever it was) safe, and a burning urge in his chest to know what Libris was up to. The more time he spent with the archivist, the more he became convinced that Libris was up to no good. Libris hadn’t stopped asking him pointed questions in class. He would frequently ask Remus to pull books down from shelves, recite random incantations, and other small tasks that made Remus feel like he was being experimented on. Once, Libris tossed a book with large silver clasps to Remus without warning, and Remus was certain that he was checking to see what effects the metal would have on him. Silver burns were a myth, but that didn’t stop Sirius from blasting a hole in a tapestry on their way out of the classroom.

“If he hurts you—” Sirius growled, wand still raised, but Remus cut him off.

“It was probably a coincidence, Sirius,” Remus said, his voice weary. “Besides, I’m fine. How many times have you seen me handle Sickles? It’s just an old wives’ tale.”

“But what if it wasn’t?” Sirius persisted. “That old bastard was willing to use you as a test subject.”

“You were right, Moony,” James added. “There’s something off about him, and we’re going to find out what.”

The next week, Sirius knocked over an entire bookshelf in Defense Against the Dark Arts to distract Libris while James and Peter searched his office. They found nothing but a load of empty crisps packets (Libris had a fondness for salt and vinegar, apparently), a stack of ungraded essays, and a filing cabinet that neither _Alohomora_ nor several minutes of Peter fumbling with a lock pick could open.

On Thursday, James and Peter camped out in Libris’s office under the Invisibility Cloak after class. Remus curled up in the Common Room with _A History of Magic,_ attempting to ignore the blistering headache of the imminent full moon and the fact that Sirius had been talking with Marlene in hushed voices for the past half hour, which was becoming an increasingly common occurrence. Remus wanted to go to bed. He had wanted to go to bed for hours, but he was waiting for Sirius, and he couldn’t shake the fear that if he left, Sirius and Marlene might — 

Well, he wasn’t sure what, but whatever it was, it wouldn’t be good.

James and Peter returned around eleven, when Remus was so exhausted he had to dig his nails into his palm just to keep from falling asleep on the spot.

“Nothing,” James said as soon as Remus opened his mouth to ask. “Just hours and hours of him grading papers and listening to the same — sodding — Blodwyn — Bludd — record over and over.”

“If I ever hear _Sucking Your Life In the Moonlight_ again, it’ll be too soon,” Peter groused. “Also, he went through _five_ whole crisps packets! Five! No one should like crisps that much, and that’s coming from — are you okay, Moony?”

Remus had slipped sideways in the chair, the weight of his throbbing head too much to hold up. He hastily sat back up, even as his muscles screamed in protest. “I’m fine.”

“You should go to bed,” James said gently. Remus shook his head.

“I’ve got another chapter I need to read before tomorrow — “

“Binns never checks the reading.”

“— And,” Remus continued, as if Peter hadn’t interrupted, “I’m waiting for Sirius.”

He tried and failed to keep a note of bitterness from slicing through his voice.

“What’s up with those two?” Remus went on. “I thought they hated each other.”

As soon as the question spilled out, he wished he could take it back. He hated the transparent whine in his voice, hated how his exhaustion and the full moon lowered his inhibitions, leaving his emotions a hardened rubber band that was wont to snap at any moment. James raised his eyebrow and followed his gaze to where Sirius and Marlene were still deep in conversation, apparently unaware of the other Marauders’ arrival.

“Well…” James said slowly. “I s’pose Marlene appreciates that Sirius hasn’t tried to jinx her in a year or so. And they’re both Beaters now, so they’ve been spending a lot of time together in practice.”

“Why?” Peter asked with a small smirk. “Are you jealous?”

“No!” Remus burst out. His heart hammered at Peter’s accusation and he wasn’t sure why. “Of course I’m not. Sirius is allowed to have other friends.”

“Of course he is,” James said. He was watching Remus carefully, a shrewd look on his face like he knew more than even Remus himself about what Remus was feeling. Remus trained his eyes back on _A History of Magic_. He held his expression carefully neutral and flinched when James called out suddenly, “OI! SIRIUS ORION BLACK! BEDTIME!”

Sirius leapt up from his chair at once. “Coming, Mum! Night, McKinnon.”

“Remus was lonely,” Peter informed Sirius as they climbed the stairs to the dorms.

“I was not,” Remus said, his entire face heating up. “What is it, pick on Remus day?”

James’s probing gaze didn’t leave him until they all fell into bed, but Remus wasn’t thinking about that. His dreams were filled with Sirius and Marlene McKinnon, their long black hair twining together as they rendezvoused in dark corners throughout the castle, drawing closer and closer to each other until —

The first full moon of the term arrived on Friday, all too quickly for Remus’s liking. Friday full moons meant most of Remus’s weekend was eaten up in the Hospital Wing, but they also meant that he didn’t (usually) miss any classes. He grit his teeth and pushed past the nausea and exhaustion that fought him through his morning courses and met Madame Pomfrey shortly before dinner.

Every year, someone — Dumbledore? Pomfrey? McGonagall? Remus had never asked — went through the Shrieking Shack and tidied up the worst of the wolf’s damage. They mended the cabinets that had been reduced to kindling and the pillows that were little more than piles of feathers held together with a few stray threads. They threw away anything that had been torn up beyond reparo and replaced it with new furniture for the wolf to toy with. The furniture was worn and clearly secondhand, but it still made Remus feel incredibly guilty as he looked around the Shack. A part of him wished they would just leave the house unfurnished, so he wouldn’t have to see the destruction the wolf wrought, but the rest of him knew that the wolf would turn its boredom and frustration even more inward.

“There’s a nice wool blanket for you on the bed, dear,” Madame Pomfrey told him. “It’s bewitched to be resistant to all manner of scratches and tears, so you won’t harm it.”

Remus felt a rush of warmth towards the matron. He wanted to hug her, but he was fourteen now, and he wasn’t sure that was the sort of thing fourteen-year-old boys were supposed to do. He settled with saying shyly, “Thank you, Madame Pomfrey.”

“Of course, dear,” she said. She ruffled his hair fondly, which he was also sure he was too old for, but he wasn’t going to correct her. “I’ll be back in the morning.”

When Madame Pomfrey had gone, Remus paced around the master bedroom. He had about an hour until moonrise, according to the ever-sharpening ache in his bones. He thought longingly, not for the first time, of a Dreamless Sleep potion, of falling into blissful oblivion until the moon had set and this whole thing was over. But that would never work. His werewolf form was resistant to most magic. He would snap awake just in time for his bones to crack and the fur to push through his skin.

Remus wandered over to a corner of the room where a bookshelf had been installed. That was new. There had never been books in the Shack before. Remus had often thought of bringing something in order to kill the time before the transformation, but he hadn’t wanted to risk any of his own belongings, nor the possibility of incurring Pince’s wrath for destroying a library book. And he would destroy them. That he was sure of, as he ran his fingers along the bumpy spines, and the guilt washed over him again in a wave so deep it threatened to drown him. He hoped they didn’t belong to anyone. He reached out for a copy of _The Tales of Beedle the Bard_ , but a stabbing sensation shot through his chest, and he hissed in pain. There would be no time for reading tonight.

The transformation had begun.


	6. Of Moons and Mornings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are ups and downs to every full moon, otherwise known as: angst??? you wanted??? angst???

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's late, it's short, but it's not nothin i guess?

Everything was on fire.

Remus’s thoughts came slowly, in fragments and blurry shapes that swam on the edge of his consciousness. He had to concentrate hard, coax them into view and then sharpen them into focus. He couldn’t think in full sentences. The words came one by one: _dark. Pain. Moon, wolf, awake._

_Awake._

Remus was awake. Awake enough to recognize the stinging slap of consciousness. Awake enough to recognize that he was no longer floating in a blissful sea of oblivion. Every inch of his body was in pain, from the top of his head to the tips of his toes. Remus swore even his hair ached. The pain came in a sharp bite and a dull, bone-deep ache all at once.

“Good, you’re awake,” Madame Pomfrey said, though Remus hadn’t yet opened his eyes. The words swam into his ears and took their leisurely time making their way to his brain. By the time he had fully processed her words, she was talking again, more sounds that his mind strained to keep up with. Remus’s head pounded. Remus couldn’t remember a time when his head wasn’t pounding.

“— scratches on your chest were shallow, I think the new chair in the sitting room must have worn the claws down some, but your right leg wasn’t so lucky. I fixed the break, but the bite went deep —“

Remus took a deep breath to steel himself and opened his eyes. The world was offensively bright. His eyes reflexively snapped back shut. Remus winced as he forced them back open. Madame Pomfrey had broken off her sentence to watch him, her eyebrows wrinkled with concern.

“Eight,” Remus croaked out. The word scraped up his throat like a dull knife. Talking was difficult in the first few hours after the transformation, though, to be fair, so was everything. The matron had devised a simpler system for communication back when he was a first year. Remus would give her a number, on a scale from one to ten, to describe how much pain he was in. One was a stubbed toe. Ten she had called _crucio_ , but Remus had mentally renamed it _transformation_. He had never been under the Cruciatus Curse, but it was impossible for him to imagine anything worse than every bone snapping at once as his body reshaped itself. Usually, Remus woke up to a five or a six, with the first transformation of the year clocking in around a seven. The wolf enjoyed the amount of space it had in the Shack — it certainly enjoyed not being manacled in his parents’ cellar — but the smell of the Hogsmeade villagers sent it into a frenzy after a handful of moons on the isolated Welsh moors.

As soon as the word “eight” left his lips, Remus saw the flash of pity in Madame Pomfrey’s eyes and wished he could take it back. He watched her eyes flicker to his right leg — Remus hadn’t dared glance at it, not yet, the waves of pain enough to let him know it was a mess to be dealt with later — as she had the same realization that he did.

“Eight” meant the transformations were getting worse.

Remus had known this was coming. There weren’t many accounts on werewolf adolescence (Remus was acutely aware that most bitten as young as he died within the year, much less ten), but the physics was simple enough. Bigger wolf, bigger hunger, bigger teeth, bigger rage. Remus wondered what would be stronger, in the end: the wolf’s desire to live or the wolf’s desire to consume.

Remus wondered how many more full moons he had left before he didn’t wake up at all.

“I’m sorry, dear,” Madame Pomfrey said, so softly that if Remus hadn’t seen her lips move he might have thought he imagined it. He tried to smile, but it came out more of a grimace. She patted his arm gently before raising a handful of vials. “We’ve got one blood replenishing potion, plenty of agrimony, some girding potion, Essence of Dittany, and one dreamless sleep potion to round it out.”

“My favorite chaser,” Remus muttered.

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” Madame Pomfrey tutted. She tipped the vials to Remus’s mouth one by one. Remus barely noticed their taste as they slid over his tongue. All he cared about was the sweet release of sleep that swallowed him up the moment the last potion hit his throat.

The next time the waking world wrenched Remus from the grasp of unconsciousness, it was not with the gentle sounds of Madame Pomfrey’s care, but the all-too-familiar clamor of an argument between two Gryffindor boys. Remus kept his eyes closed, a faint smile rising to his face. Officially, Madame Pomfrey had a no-visitor policy for the curtained-off bed that was the Remus Lupin Ward. Unofficially, Remus knew that she couldn’t possibly resist the combined power of Peter, Sirius, and James’s puppy dog eyes. Merlin, he loved his friends. He bet they had brought chocolate. Peter always had a bar of Honeydukes’ Finest on hand for every post-transformation visit.  
Remus’s smile faded a bit when he began to make out the words of their fight.

“Look at his leg, James!” Sirius hissed.

“You know the September moon’s the roughest on him —“ James started, but Sirius cut him off.

“You can see the bloody bone! That’s not rough, that’s… that’s… Merlin, James, we have to do something —“

“We _are_ doing something —“

“Not fast enough!” There was a loud _thud_ and the angry rattle of the bedside lamp as Sirius slammed his fist down on the nightstand. His voice rose, colored with an emotion that Remus couldn’t quite place. “This time, it was his leg. Next time, what if it’s his face? His throat?”

“I won’t let that happen.”

“Do you think the wolf cares what wizards will or won’t _let it do_?” Sirius shot back. “We’re useless, we’re goddamn useless, unless we—“

“Alright,” James said finally. He lowered his voice even more, so quiet that if Remus were anyone else — if Remus were any more human — he might not have heard it, and he added, “The second years are doing Mandrakes in Herbology. I’ll nick some leaves the next time we’re in the greenhouses. Is that fast enough for you?”

Sirius made a noise in the back of his throat. Whether or not it was agreement, Remus never found out, because Peter chose that moment to pipe up for the first time.   
“He’s awake.”

“How’d you know?” Remus rasped out. As if he had read Remus’s thoughts — as if he had read the feelings that Remus hadn’t even had time to form into thoughts — Sirius reached for the pitcher of water on the nightstand and brought it to Remus’s lips. Remus drank gratefully, the cool water soothing the crackling parchment of his throat.

“Your eyebrows,” Peter said. “They wrinkle in the middle whenever you’re eavesdropping.”

“You were eavesdropping on us?” Sirius gasped, drawing his hand to his chest dramatically. “Remus, how could you?”

“I don’t think it counts as eavesdropping when your best friends are having a row right over your head,” Remus said dryly. “Have you ever heard of _Muffliato_?”

“Exactly how much did you hear?” James asked in response. He ran a hand through his hair all too casually.

“Enough to know that you’re up to something,” Remus said, struggling to shift into a sitting position. “And enough to know that whatever it is, it won’t work. Full moons will always be the same. I’ll always turn into a vicious monster and I’ll always tear myself apart and I’ll always find a way to survive. You don’t need to worry about me.”  
“Of course not,” James said quickly. “Anyway, I know that we said we were done tinkering with the prank, but —“

James and Peter launched into an elaborate explanation of potential additions to the prank, from charming the curtains on the four-posters to turn into seaweed to dissolving the stone floor into sand. Remus made quiet mmmhmmms and ooooohs as was required, but he still had a dragging feeling in the pit of his stomach that there was something his friends weren’t telling him. He looked up and realized that, as James and Peter chattered away, Sirius was staring at him in uncharacteristic silence. The black-haired boy’s gaze was so intense that Remus’s heart skipped a beat. At some point, Sirius’s hand had come to settle on his shoulder, the one not covered in a thick layer of bandages, and he rubbed slow circles onto Remus’s skin through his hospital gown. Remus’s whole body hummed with the motion.

On second thought, maybe this full moon hadn’t been so bad, after all.


	7. The Needle in the Needlestack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Great Prank is finally here, but will it go as smoothly as planned? Or will it, like all plans of mice and men, gang aft agly?

On the first Tuesday of October, the Marauders were awake long before dawn. Peter had been banished to the corridor by the staff quarters on McGonagall Watch. James was treading a small ditch in the stone floor with his nervous pacing, and though Sirius was feigning aloofness, his body was taut like a wire. The giddy anticipation that Remus felt before every prank filled him like champagne bubbles. James hadn’t uttered the code word yet, but Remus still kept his ears perked up for the faint shrieks of Lily, Alice, Mary, and Marlene waking up to beds full of seaweed and sand. Finally, when Remus thought he would burst from the waiting, James stopped still and asked,

“Is it time?”

“It’s time,” Sirius confirmed with a sharp nod.

James swallowed. “Alright, then—”

“ _Let’s get wet!_ ” the three Marauders chanted in unison.

Nothing happened.

“Er,” James said, after several moments of blinking at each other. “How will we know if it worked?”

“We—”

“CODE RED, CODE RED!” Peter’s voice echoed from the mirror on Sirius’s nightstand. The three Marauders scrambled over. “McGonagall is awake and headed your way!”

“That’s impossible,” Sirius said, his eyebrows furrowing. “We just activated the charm seconds ago, how could she know?”

James and Remus’s heads swiveled in unison to the corner of the dormitory where they had kept the Flying Seahorses. It was littered with dead lacewing flies and a pile of empty eggshells as high as Remus’s knees.

“Shite. _Shite!_ ” James swore. “We’ve got to clean this up, if McGonagall takes one look at this we’ll be in detention until we’re fifty.”

“We’ll just toss it under your Invisibility Cloak,” Remus said.

“We can’t.” James’s voice was pained. “We’re already using it to hide—”

“Dungbombs,” Sirius interrupted. “Loads and loads of dungbombs. A suspension’s worth of dungbombs.”

A sharp hook pierced through Remus’s skin and tugged at his chest. Sirius was lying. None of the Marauders had brought any dungbombs back from the summer holidays; James had loudly lamented the fact during a Potions class in which Snape was “being particularly bomb-able.” But even if Remus hadn’t known this, he would have been able to tell from the way Sirius’s gaze, usually so steady and fierce, kept flickering to the left, as if it was paining him to look Remus in the eye. He looked to Peter’s face in the mirror for answers, but the blonde-haired boy was staring resolutely at the floor. The hook in his chest jerked upward, tugging painfully at sinew and muscle and bone. Whatever it was, Peter was in on it. Whatever it was, his friends were deliberately keeping him in the dark.

Remus could feel himself teetering on the edge of panic. His breath frayed at the edges. _Focus_ , he told himself. He could worry about his friends—they were still his friends, right?—and their secrets later. Right now, they had to clear the dormitory of prank evidence.

“Right,” Remus said, inhaling sharply to focus. “James, Transfigure that tank back to _Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them_. Sirius, sweep up those lacewing flies.”

“Yes, sir,” Sirius said with a salute and a smirk that made Remus’s stomach do a backflip.

“As for the eggs—”

“—already on it.” James raised his wand with a cocky grin. “I saw Evans being all goody-two-shoes and practicing a Disillusionment Charm the other day, I bet you anything I can replicate it.”

“James, Charms really isn’t your strong suit, maybe you should—” Remus started, but it was too late. James muttered an unintelligible spell and a beam of neon light shot towards the eggshells.

The eggshells lit up like a beacon. Instead of camouflaging to the background, they emitted a brilliant green light so bright Remus squinted and covered his eyes.

“ _Shite_!” James hissed again.

“Excellent work, Potter,” Sirius said with a grin that was far too cavalier for the amount of trouble they were about to be in.

“I must have misheard the incantation—maybe it was something like—”

“We don’t have time,” Remus cut him off. “ _Accio Flying Seahorse eggs!_ ”

The eggshells flew into Remus’s bag. A hazy green glow peeked through the seams, but it was better than nothing. Remus threw his robes on over his pyjamas.

“If McGonagall asks,” he said, lacing up his trainers, “I went to the Hospital Wing. She knows the full moon was three days ago; it won’t seem suspicious.”

“Where are you going?” Sirius asked.

“To ditch this somewhere. I’ll try up on the seventh floor, by the Divination Tower—you know McGonagall never hangs around up there if she can help it.”

“Brilliant, Rem, you’re the best.”

“I try,” Remus said. He pushed down a hundred replies that all involved asking why, if he was, in fact, the best, his friends were keeping secrets from him.

This early in the morning, the halls were deserted, lit in the shadowy limbo between candelabras and sunlight. Remus took the stairs two at a time, pressing his bag against him and trying to block the ominous glow seeping out. He walked as fast as he dared without breaking into a full-on run.

Remus made it to the seventh floor without seeing a single soul. There was a hallway somewhere around here lined with suits of armor. He could easily stash the eggshells there, provided the hallway hadn’t decided to move, as it was wont to do in Tuesdays. He passed the tapestry of Brunhilde the Benign knitting a scarf for her pet kneazle. Yes, the hallway was just up ahead, he was sure of it.

Remus rounded the corner and immediately came face-to-face with Mr. Harrington. He swallowed. The caretaker’s cat had never liked him—whether he could smell his wolfish side or he had simply come to associate Remus with troublemaking and mischief, he always eyed him with suspicion. Remus took a deep breath. He blinked slowly and deliberately. He had read somewhere that cats trusted you more if you blinked slowly. It was something about it being a sign of submission. Remus would gladly have rolled over onto his stomach and played dead if it had meant Mr. Harrington wouldn’t rat him out to Filch.

“I’m just going for a walk,” Remus told the cat. He started to back away slowly. “That’s all. Plenty of other students are up and about already.”

Mr. Harrington cocked his head to the side, as if considering.

“That’s right. I’m not doing anything suspicious. I’m just going to turn back around the corner and…”

Mr. Harrington’s amber eyes fixed on Remus’s glowing schoolbag and he let out a yowl.

“Bugger all,” Remus muttered. He started to sprint down the hallway, knowing he had mere seconds before the middle-aged caretaker appeared. Why, oh why, had he picked the only hallway on the seventh floor that was completely devoid of passages and tapestries and hiding spots? Why, oh why, had he—

Remus stumbled to a stop. There was a door in front of him. He could have sworn the wall had been empty a minute ago, and yet there it was, a plain, unmarked wooden door sitting there as if it were waiting for him.

Remus had only a moment to decide. He could hear Filch’s footsteps approaching, the caretaker wheezing in his excitement to catch a troublemaker in the act. Remus turned the doorknob and flung himself inside.

The sight before him made Remus gasp.

He was standing in a room the size of a large cathedral, complete with towering windows and a ceiling so tall it vanished in shadow above him. Instead of pews, the room was filled with towers of—there was no other word for it—rubbish. There were Fanged Frisbees and winged catapults; chipped bottles of congealed potions; chairs with legs chipped and missing; a gilded cage containing a skeleton that had no fewer than five legs.

Remus rubbed his eyes. He had to be hallucinating. No one knew the castle better than the four Marauders, and yet Remus was certain he would have remembered stumbling on a room like this. His feet drew him deeper into the room as if he was being pulled onward by a magnet. Piles and piles of books sprouted dust and black mould. Remus started to run his finger over the spines, but drew back when his hand caught on something decidedly slimy.

“What are you?” Remus murmured to the room.

The room didn’t answer.

Except—

There—

Oh so faintly—

There was a voice muttering on the far end of the room. It was deep, so deep, and so quiet Remus could barely distinguish it from the sound of his own breath. The sound pricked at Remus’s memory; he knew that voice, even if he couldn’t make out what it was saying.

Every instinct that Remus had was telling him to leave. But he kept creeping forward, pressing his body against the towers of lost objects, driven by a desire—no, a need—to know who it was who had come to this room that shouldn’t exist and, more importantly, what they had come to hide.

That’s what this room was, Remus realized, as he held his breath past an enormous stuffed troll and several rusted swords. It was a hiding place. It was the best hiding place. Everything here looked out of place and, therefore, none of it looked out of place. Why bury a needle in a haystack when you could secret it away in a stack of other needles?

Remus set his hand on his wand as he drew closer. He could make out a few words now, “hidden” and “book” and—Remus’s heart was pounding so fast he was sure it was about to explode—”blood.” He pressed himself against a stained cabinet and peered around the corner.

A tall wizard in chevron-patterned robes knelt on the floor. His dark hair flopped over his eyes as he rifled through the pockets of an oversized cloak, grunting with frustration as he went. 

It was Professor Libris. Objects were strewn haphazardly around him, as if they had all been examined and discarded one by one. A torn copy of _Tales of Beedle the Bard_ , three peacock quills, an old Shooting Star that trembled in the air like leaves quaking on a tree. None of them were what he sought, and though Remus knew he should go, knew he should back away and face whatever punishment Filch devised for him, he couldn’t stop watching as the archivist’s quest grew more and more desperate. What could Libris possibly be searching for? Was it the same mysterious object he had tasked Snape, Macnair, and Regulus Black to seek in the library?

Against every ounce of judgment he possessed, Remus crept closer.

Libris’s head snapped up.

“Well, well, well,” Libris said, straightening up. He clasped his hands together in front of him with an ominous _clap_. “If it isn’t the werewolf prodigy himself.”

Remus fumbled for breath, for an excuse, for an out. “Sir, I—I’m so sorry, sir, I was just—”

“Sticking your snout where it doesn’t belong?”

Remus reeled as if he had been slapped. Libris’s prodding questions in class had been one thing; he hadn’t expected outright bigotry. “Sir?”

“I know your little friends have been following me.” Libris stepped closer. Remus clenched his fists, one hand gripping his wand so tightly his knuckles went white, refusing to step backwards. He wouldn’t let Libris intimidate him.

The professor went on, a cold glint in his dark eyes. “You think you’re all so clever, don’t you? But distractions and disguises can’t fool my wards. At best, I could have you suspended for breaking into my office.”

Libris looked him up and down, and Remus was reminded of the way a boa constrictor lies flat next to its prey when sizing it up for digestion. “At worst… well, let’s just say this is a very dangerous room. Not malicious in nature, no, but when so many Dark objects have been stashed here over the years… accidents happen.”

Remus was so scared he thought he might be sick. But he remembered what he said to Peter just weeks ago, about courage being something you had to choose again and again, so he raised his chin and looked Libris directly in the eye and said, “Are you threatening me, sir?”

Libris gave him a smile that exposed all of his teeth. “That depends. Do you feel threatened?”

Libris reached for his wand and Remus didn’t stop to think.

“ _DEPULSO!_ ” he shouted. A jet of red light slammed into a stack of books and sent them flying towards Libris. Remus turned and sprinted for the exit. He sent Banishing Charms over his shoulder as he went, not stopping to see if they hit their targets.

 _Where’s the exit, where’s the exit?_ Remus thought as he wove his way through crumbling statues and piles of rubies. He could hear Libris thundering behind him. Something whooshed past him and Remus had to veer to the right as a tattered set of robes caught on fire.

_Where’s the bloody exit?!_

And then it was in front of him, the unassuming wooden door whose handle Remus now gripped like a life raft.

Remus slammed it behind him as fast as he could. He bent double over the stone floor, half sure he was about to be sick.

The door melted back into the wall.

“Mr. Lupin?”

Remus jumped.

Professor Dumbledore was standing there, his eyes twinkling as he twirled a violently purple lollipop between his long fingers. He didn’t look remotely surprised to see Remus. It was as if he had known all along that the brown-haired boy would appear from a mysterious door in the wall at approximately 10:30am on a Tuesday in October, gasping for breath and looking as though he had seen an Inferi.

“I, er, hello Professor,” Remus managed to splutter out. He was only vaguely aware of his bag pressing into his hip, still glowing faintly with the Flying Seahorse eggshells. The Prank seemed so far away now, the memory of a memory he could barely call to mind.

“Being, as I am—if you’ll forgive an old man’s indulgence of ego—in possession of quite a bit of knowledge, I find that some of the minutia of everyday life often slip away from me… however, I believe most of your peers are down in the Great Hall enjoying some breakfast?”

Dumbledore’s tone was kind, but Remus still felt his stomach squirm with guilt, or maybe it was residual terror. Was Libris about to burst through the door behind him? Remus cast his gaze down. His whole body felt flushed and shaky.

“Yes, Professor. I, er, wasn’t feeling well, you see, and I thought that a walk might clear my head.”

 _Merlin_ , Remus was doing terribly at this whole lying thing, a task at which he usually felt quite accomplished. He shivered uncontrollably and pulled his robes close. Remus forced himself to take several deep breaths.

“Is there anything on your mind, Remus?” Dumbledore asked.

Remus clutched his bag tighter, but somehow he knew that wasn’t what the headmaster was talking about. As he stared at Dumbledore, he imagined the old man’s kindly face morphing into Libris’s thin lips and sharp eyebrows, the ghost of a threat on his pointed teeth.

Remus opened his mouth to tell Dumbledore everything, and then he immediately shut it.

He thought of the Shrieking Shack, of the new linens on the bed and the bookshelf full of novel distractions. Dumbledore had already done so much for him. Who was he to come running to the headmaster with every tiny complaint? It wasn’t as though Remus hadn’t been threatened before. His family had hopped from village to village, often living as Muggles in hopes that no one would discover his secret, but someone always did. There were Wizards everywhere: Muggleborns returning to their roots, half-bloods caring for their ageing parents, jaded old witches who got a thrill from teaching the young men in town remarkably realistic magic tricks. And when they caught wind that their new neighbors had a young son, very sickly, with a complexion that waxed and waned in time with the moon…

Well, Remus was used to threats. Why bother Dumbledore with Professor Libris’s taunts when Remus knew he would face ten times worse when he graduated Hogwarts? He could picture it now: the headmaster’s eyes softening in pity, his hand reaching out to clamp Remus’s shoulder as he told the teenage werewolf that he was sorry, but that’s just the way it was.

“No, sir,” Remus said, his voice only barely trembling. “Nothing at all.”


End file.
